Her attachments to the city were simply a bonus. It was good to be near her grandfather again, and she was working with her oldest friend, Helen Kovacs. The thought of Helen brought a frown to Faith’s face as she packed her work bag. Helen was still struggling in the early stages of her academic career–she had left academia after she had graduated, and had only recently returned and completed her PhD. It was hard in the current climate for a woman in her thirties with children to compete against the unencumbered twenty-three-year-olds who were applying for post-doctoral appointments now. Faith’s meeting this morning was with Helen, and it would be the first time she’d had to act in her position as Helen’s line manager.
Faith and Helen had met at the prestigious grammar school they both attended. It prided itself on its academic excellence and appealed to parents who wanted their children to have a traditional education. The uniform they wore was supposed to iron out any differences of background that the children brought to the school, but the adolescent jungle of status and conformity operated there just the same.
Faith, who lived with her immigrant grandfather and had no visible parents, was an object of suspicion. Helen, whose parents were working class and who lived on a modern housing estate in Salford, was a complete outsider. Her father was a builder who was earning just enough to buy his daughter what he believed would be the best education for her. Helen’s accent was wrong, her clothes were wrong, she lived in the wrong place and had the wrong parents. The pack turned on her.
The two girls, with the well-honed survival instincts that six years in the school system had given them, had drawn together. They were both bright, they were both athletic, and Faith soon discovered that Helen had a dry wit and a talent for sharp mockery that matched her own. They had seen off their tormentors and established a friendship that had endured into adulthood. They had gone to Oxford together, shared a flat through their student years, seen each other through the ecstasy of first relationships and the subsequent heartbreak. And even though their lives had gone down different paths since then, they had stayed close.
Faith went into the kitchen and put some bread in the toaster. There was coffee left from the night before. She poured some into a mug and put it in the microwave. As she watched the light of the LED, her phone rang. She checked the number. It was her mother. Katya Lange rarely phoned her daughter. Their contacts tended to be Christmas and birthdays and the occasional good-will call that Katya was hardly likely to make at 7.45 in the morning.
Puzzled, she answered it. ‘Hello?’
‘I’m glad I caught you.’ Katya’s voice was brisk. ‘Listen, Faith, there’s a bit of a problem with Marek.’
‘What is it? Is he ill?’ Her grandfather, Marek Lange, was in his eighties. He was stubbornly independent and would accept almost no help, though Faith had tried often enough to persuade him.
‘Nothing like that. You’d be the first to hear. It’s this journalist…’
Faith sighed. She really didn’t want to have this conversation again. A journalist, a man called Jake Denbigh, wanted to interview Grandpapa for a series of articles he was writing about changing attitudes to refugees. Marek Lange, a Polish refugee who had fought on the side of the Allies in the last war, had attracted his interest.
The interview seemed a valid enough enterprise to Faith. She’d read some of Denbigh’s articles and she’d heard him once or twice on late-night discussion programmes on Radio 4. As far as Faith could see, the interview would be something her grandfather would enjoy. He was an opinionated man, and would relish the chance to express his views. She thought it would add a bit of variety to a life that was becoming more and more circumscribed by old age, but Katya had been against it from the start.
‘I told you what I think,’ Faith said now. ‘It’s up to him. It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘It’s more urgent than that,’ Katya said. ‘Marek’s agreed to do the interview. It’s happening this morning.’
‘Well–good for him.’ Her toast was done. She hunted round for the spread.
‘I’m not so sure. I’ve had a bad feeling about this from the start. I don’t trust this Denbigh man, so I looked some stuff up. A few months ago, he got involved in a witch-hunt in Blackburn about a man they said was an ex-Nazi. It got nasty.’
‘Oh.’ That gave Faith pause for thought. Her grandfather had escaped from Nazi-occupied Poland to join the Polish Free Forces in England in 1943. He had arrived alone, his family and his past lost in the chaos behind him. All that was left were the stories he used to tell her when she was a child, stories about his own childhood, a childhood that had been obliterated as surely as the cities of Europe had been razed in the final destruction of that conflict. His war years in occupied Europe were something he never spoke of, ever.
If Jake Denbigh’s focus was Nazis, especially if he was looking for lurid headlines, then Faith shared her mother’s misgivings. ‘He isn’t going to talk to any journalist about it,’ she said slowly. ‘He wouldn’t discuss it with his own family, never mind a stranger.’ She sometimes thought it would have been a good thing if he had done, but now it was probably best left where it was, sealed away in his mind.
‘I wish I shared your confidence,’ Katya said. ‘This man is a professional. It’s his job to get people talking.’
‘I’m not confident. I just don’t know what to do. It’s still up to Grandpapa in the end.’
‘I thought…’ Katya said, the tentative note in her voice triggering Faith’s alarm system, ‘…that maybe you could go over. Sit in on the interview. Then if this Denbigh person tries anything…’
Perhaps she should. ‘I’ve got meetings today. It depends what time they’ve arranged the interview.’
‘Eleven,’ Katya said.
She was meeting Helen at nine–that would take less than an hour, with luck. She’d pencilled in the rest of the morning for writing the article…she could work on that tonight, cancel her plans for the evening. She’d still need some time to prepare for the meeting, but it was doable. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there.’
She checked the clock as she put the phone down. It was almost eight–she’d better get going. Her meeting with Helen today was a professional thing, part of her new role. If the two women hadn’t known each other so well, it could have been tricky.
Helen had left Oxford with a First, but instead of pursuing the academic career she had planned, she had come back to Manchester to marry Daniel Kovacs. This decision had been beyond Faith’s comprehension. Helen was pregnant, but that didn’t seem to be a good reason to give up her academic carer. Faith didn’t like Daniel–he was attractive, but there was a watchful hostility about him, a coldness that made him a strange choice for the warm, vivacious Helen. Despite Faith’s misgivings, Helen had been unstoppable. She had asked Faith to be godmother to their son, Finn, who had been born six months later, and this had gone a long way towards healing the slight breach in their friendship.
Their lives had taken different routes after that. Helen had stayed near Manchester, moving with Daniel to Shawbridge, one of the small cotton towns on the outskirts of the city, to live on a road that was not much different from the one where she had grown up. Daniel’s work as an electrician was thriving, and Helen became a full-time housewife and mother.
Faith had stayed at Oxford to work on her PhD. She took her duties as godmother seriously, visiting as often as she could, writing letters, sending cards and
